Libertarian socialist ideas have had a fertile field for expansion in
Galicia since some delegates from the Bakuninist wing of the First
International arrived in the country in the last third of the 19th
century. The anti-authoritarian current of internationalist socialism
caught on well in a people that at the time was in a process of
proletarianization, and in a country where the principles of
self-management, mutual support and collectivism had deep roots. ----
The first manifestation of this internationalist socialism was in the
labor field, with the foundation in 1871 of the local labor federations
of A Coruña, Ferrol and Ourense. It was the manual workers (stonemasons,
seamstresses, shoemakers, tailors and carpenters, among others), and not
the intellectuals, who promoted and disseminated libertarian ideas and
principles in the country, causing anarchism to spread in Galicia hand
in hand with class organizations. Since then, and throughout the
following decades, Galician anarchism became popular. Attached to the
material struggles of the Galician proletariat and peasantry, the
country's anarchists built a true mass movement that was continuously
growing.
This interweaving of anarchist ideas with the aspirations of the
Galician working class only experienced a moment of refinement. This
happened in the 1890s, in a context of enormous repression and disunity
in the Galician labor movement. If on the one hand state persecution had
led to the imprisonment and exile of many of the main internationalist
militants, on the other hand the failure of the mobilizations of May 1,
1892 had led to a raw confrontation between anarchists and socialists.
In A Coruña the anarchists fought with the members of the newly founded
Socialist Group for blaming each other for the failure of the May
mobilizations. A tension that caused the detachment of the A Coruña
proletariat from the Local Workers' Federation and a drastic reduction
in its members, which in turn led to the loss of momentum to continue
the work of publishing its mouthpiece, El Corsario. It was then, in
January 1893, that some of the most prominent anarchists from A Coruña
founded the group Ni Dios, Ni Amo , through which they assumed the
direction of that newspaper. This event had repercussions throughout the
country, given the ability of Herculean anarchism to influence the
Galician libertarian movement, a leadership that increased after
September, when the suspension of the Barcelona newspaper El Productor
turned El Corsario into the unofficial spokesman for Spanish anarchism.
The members of the group Ni Dios, Ni Amo then gave the newspaper a more
ideological orientation, partially distancing themselves from the daily
struggles of the Galician proletariat in the labor and social spheres.
This orientation responded to a new strategic approach by some of the
most unique anarchists from Herculaneum, who bet everything on the
radicalization of the discourse, with an insurrectionist perspective
that justified any attack against the established order and focused on
the riots and rebellions that were taking place in the state territory,
in which they guessed a kind of sign of the arrival of the Social
Revolution. However, while labor rights were in alarming decline, the
cost of living was increasing and colonial wars were decimating Galician
families, the incendiary speeches and calls for the Social Revolution of
the Ni Dios, Ni Amo group were not having the slightest impact on a
Galician proletariat orphaned of concrete proposals and initiatives to
fight against that situation of generalized misery. It was then that one
of the members of this group, the tailor José Sanjurjo, recognized - in
a text sent to the Third Libertarian Socialist Contest, organized in
1898 in La Plata by the Argentine group Progreso y Libertad - the
failure of this strategy and the suicidal isolation.which had led to
anarchism, as well as the need to get closer to the working masses again
and to revive their confidence in the anarchists. According to Sanjurjo,
the anarchists, without renouncing their specific groups, had to rejoin
the societies of resistance to capital, the mutual aid societies, the
cooperatives and other organizations of the working class in order to
"imprint the[labor]movement with the greatest possible revolutionary and
emancipatory character". In the strategy proposed by Sanjurjo, which the
Galician anarchists would implement in the coming years, the specific
groups, far from being diluted in the class organizations, would act
within them, thus having a greater field of action in which to spread
their ideas and initiatives.
The re-entry of the anarchists into class organizations meant the
establishment of a firewall over the growing influence that local
socialist groups (in the sphere of the PSOE and the UGT) were spreading
in the societies of resistance to capital since the anarchists had
distanced themselves from them. This prevented the forces of the labor
movement from being hegemonized by the sectors that wanted to channel
them towards bourgeois institutions, strengthening the class
independence of the Galician proletariat. Furthermore, under the
influence of revolutionary syndicalism, inspired by the anarchists who
were now rejoining, the grassroots organizations of the Galician
proletariat passed from their primitive phase, as societies of
resistance to capital, to a state of revolutionary maturity, adopting
the form of single unions. Revolutionary syndicalism based its theory on
the concept of class struggle, and on the idea that the economic should
be the only field of action for the unions. In this field, unionists
were to use the repertoire of direct action tactics, confronting bosses
and owners without mediation of any kind. The deployment of these
tactics, which included boycott, sabotage, the union seal and the
strike, were to serve to achieve small victories and accumulate workers'
power. A process that would culminate in a revolutionary general strike
that would lead to social liquidation, that is, the expropriation of the
bourgeoisie, the socialization of the means of production and capital
and, therefore, the abolition of social classes. Since this task was
incumbent on all workers, and could only be carried out through the
union of the entire class, single unions were to be established for each
trade or branch of production, which included all workers in each
sector. For this union to occur, the unions had to give their members
freedom to profess the political doctrine they considered, and to
participate in the respective political organizations, as long as they
did not bring political debates to the economic organization, that is,
to the union.
Under the influence of revolutionary unionism, and with the full
participation of anarchists, the local workers' federations of the
country grew in militancy. This organic growth allowed the Galician
workers' movement to extend its scope of action beyond the labor field.
With the foundations laid in the professional unions, the local workers'
federations promoted the generation of new organizations to defend the
interests of the working class, such as tenant societies, agrarian
unions or economic defense committees, with which to confront the
problem of access to basic products. These were organizations that, like
the professional unions, had the vocation of grouping the entire
proletariat -beyond their ideological orientation- in a unitary struggle
against the capitalists on each front of struggle. This process of
accumulation of social force and extension of the areas of influence of
the Galician libertarian workers' movement led the Catholic chronicler
Pedro Sangro y Ros de Olano to assert, as early as 1908, that A Coruña -
a stronghold of Galician anarchism - had become a sort of "libertarian
colony in an organized regime". A libertarian colony whose area of
influence already covered by 1914 an area of more than 20km around
the city, in which the Local Workers' Federation had the capacity to
impose, through facts, and without any legislative mediation, the 8-hour
workday. He nicknamed this territorial extension in which acratic
workerism was the dominant force as the Syndicalist Canton . A canton
that had been forged in barely a decade of work by the anarchists under
the strategic parameters of revolutionary syndicalism.
The proliferation of unitary organizations of the working class struggle
generated in Galicia a social space suitable for the diffusion of
libertarian ideas among the proletariat. In the neighborhoods and towns
of the country, the anarchists founded, through their specific groups, a
number of atheneums and social studies centers, rationalist schools and
popular universities. Those institutions, together with newspapers,
pamphlets and other editorial production, helped to link the experiences
of proletarian struggle with anarchist ideas, creating a framework for
collective debate and training, and imprinting a revolutionary
orientation on the Galician labor movement. This extension of
libertarian ideas and the consequent radicalization of the Galician
proletariat could only happen because anarchism was embedded in society,
it was people, it was in the struggles of the people.
The outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the consequent influence of
the Bolshevik model on the international labor movement, among other
factors, caused the rupture of the unitary tendency that revolutionary
syndicalism had managed to instill in the Iberian labor movement, and
which had had its reference center in the National Confederation of
Labor (CNT). Despite this split in syndicalism and the closure of the
CNT's identity around anarchist ideas and principles, the Galician
Regional Confederation of the CNT had a base of more than thirty
thousand members during the Second Republic. Its union strength extended
throughout the country, coming to dominate entire branches of
production, such as fishing, whose network of unions covered almost the
entire Galician coast, grouped around the Regional Federation of the
Fishing Industry. The anarcho-syndicalists also led some of the largest
strikes in the country's history during that period. This is the case of
the strike of the paired vessels that began in July 1932 in Bouzas,
which led the Vigo fishing employers to declare a lockout. An action
that was responded to by the CNT with a general strike in the entire
Vigo fishing fleet that would paralyze work activity in that port until
December of that same year. The conflict, aggravated by the
cross-attacks between employers and unionists, was able to be sustained
by the Vigo workers for half a year thanks to the solidarity organized
by the CRG as a whole, whose unions not only made financial
contributions to the resistance fund, but also developed a network to
welcome the daughters and sons of the striking workers throughout the
country. Shortly afterwards, a strike in defense of the six-hour workday
would paralyze all economic activity linked to the construction sector
in A Coruña for several months. Since August 1933, a wave of class
solidarity has swept through all the workers' societies in the city and
the country, which, together with the creation of resistance funds,
managed to organize themselves in their workplaces to produce extra in
order to distribute the surpluses free of charge among the striking
workers, and thus meet their basic needs, and those of their families.
An experience of self-management struggle that could only be overcome
through the repression unleashed in December of that year after the
declaration of the revolutionary general strike throughout the territory
of the Spanish State. This was the context of the revolutionary frenzy
of 1933 that would extend beyond the union sphere, with some anarchist
groups starring in insurrectionary episodes, such as the attempt to
declare libertarian communism in the municipality of Oleiros, after the
assault of a hundred anarchists on the town hall and the Guardia Civil
Barracks in the town. The proclamation, two years later, of the
Libertarian Agricultural Commune of Bendilló, in the municipality of
Quiroga (Lugo), was another example of the pre-revolutionary situation
in which Galicia found itself in 1936,and the advances that the
libertarian socialist project had achieved within the Galician people. A
process of accumulation of self-managed popular power, with a
revolutionary orientation, which had been undertaken by Galician
anarchists at the end of the 19th century, and which could only be
interrupted by the military coup d'état of June 1936. The genocide
derived from that coup, and the national-Catholic dictatorship, would
manage to forcefully remove the anarchists from the Galician people. A
removal that lasts to this day, but which can begin to be reversed
through the strategic approaches of Social and Organized Anarchism.
Dani Palleiro
Xesta, Galician Anarchist Organization
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/11/21/estratexia-e-organizacion-na-historia-do-anarquismo-galego-1871-1936/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Galicia since some delegates from the Bakuninist wing of the First
International arrived in the country in the last third of the 19th
century. The anti-authoritarian current of internationalist socialism
caught on well in a people that at the time was in a process of
proletarianization, and in a country where the principles of
self-management, mutual support and collectivism had deep roots. ----
The first manifestation of this internationalist socialism was in the
labor field, with the foundation in 1871 of the local labor federations
of A Coruña, Ferrol and Ourense. It was the manual workers (stonemasons,
seamstresses, shoemakers, tailors and carpenters, among others), and not
the intellectuals, who promoted and disseminated libertarian ideas and
principles in the country, causing anarchism to spread in Galicia hand
in hand with class organizations. Since then, and throughout the
following decades, Galician anarchism became popular. Attached to the
material struggles of the Galician proletariat and peasantry, the
country's anarchists built a true mass movement that was continuously
growing.
This interweaving of anarchist ideas with the aspirations of the
Galician working class only experienced a moment of refinement. This
happened in the 1890s, in a context of enormous repression and disunity
in the Galician labor movement. If on the one hand state persecution had
led to the imprisonment and exile of many of the main internationalist
militants, on the other hand the failure of the mobilizations of May 1,
1892 had led to a raw confrontation between anarchists and socialists.
In A Coruña the anarchists fought with the members of the newly founded
Socialist Group for blaming each other for the failure of the May
mobilizations. A tension that caused the detachment of the A Coruña
proletariat from the Local Workers' Federation and a drastic reduction
in its members, which in turn led to the loss of momentum to continue
the work of publishing its mouthpiece, El Corsario. It was then, in
January 1893, that some of the most prominent anarchists from A Coruña
founded the group Ni Dios, Ni Amo , through which they assumed the
direction of that newspaper. This event had repercussions throughout the
country, given the ability of Herculean anarchism to influence the
Galician libertarian movement, a leadership that increased after
September, when the suspension of the Barcelona newspaper El Productor
turned El Corsario into the unofficial spokesman for Spanish anarchism.
The members of the group Ni Dios, Ni Amo then gave the newspaper a more
ideological orientation, partially distancing themselves from the daily
struggles of the Galician proletariat in the labor and social spheres.
This orientation responded to a new strategic approach by some of the
most unique anarchists from Herculaneum, who bet everything on the
radicalization of the discourse, with an insurrectionist perspective
that justified any attack against the established order and focused on
the riots and rebellions that were taking place in the state territory,
in which they guessed a kind of sign of the arrival of the Social
Revolution. However, while labor rights were in alarming decline, the
cost of living was increasing and colonial wars were decimating Galician
families, the incendiary speeches and calls for the Social Revolution of
the Ni Dios, Ni Amo group were not having the slightest impact on a
Galician proletariat orphaned of concrete proposals and initiatives to
fight against that situation of generalized misery. It was then that one
of the members of this group, the tailor José Sanjurjo, recognized - in
a text sent to the Third Libertarian Socialist Contest, organized in
1898 in La Plata by the Argentine group Progreso y Libertad - the
failure of this strategy and the suicidal isolation.which had led to
anarchism, as well as the need to get closer to the working masses again
and to revive their confidence in the anarchists. According to Sanjurjo,
the anarchists, without renouncing their specific groups, had to rejoin
the societies of resistance to capital, the mutual aid societies, the
cooperatives and other organizations of the working class in order to
"imprint the[labor]movement with the greatest possible revolutionary and
emancipatory character". In the strategy proposed by Sanjurjo, which the
Galician anarchists would implement in the coming years, the specific
groups, far from being diluted in the class organizations, would act
within them, thus having a greater field of action in which to spread
their ideas and initiatives.
The re-entry of the anarchists into class organizations meant the
establishment of a firewall over the growing influence that local
socialist groups (in the sphere of the PSOE and the UGT) were spreading
in the societies of resistance to capital since the anarchists had
distanced themselves from them. This prevented the forces of the labor
movement from being hegemonized by the sectors that wanted to channel
them towards bourgeois institutions, strengthening the class
independence of the Galician proletariat. Furthermore, under the
influence of revolutionary syndicalism, inspired by the anarchists who
were now rejoining, the grassroots organizations of the Galician
proletariat passed from their primitive phase, as societies of
resistance to capital, to a state of revolutionary maturity, adopting
the form of single unions. Revolutionary syndicalism based its theory on
the concept of class struggle, and on the idea that the economic should
be the only field of action for the unions. In this field, unionists
were to use the repertoire of direct action tactics, confronting bosses
and owners without mediation of any kind. The deployment of these
tactics, which included boycott, sabotage, the union seal and the
strike, were to serve to achieve small victories and accumulate workers'
power. A process that would culminate in a revolutionary general strike
that would lead to social liquidation, that is, the expropriation of the
bourgeoisie, the socialization of the means of production and capital
and, therefore, the abolition of social classes. Since this task was
incumbent on all workers, and could only be carried out through the
union of the entire class, single unions were to be established for each
trade or branch of production, which included all workers in each
sector. For this union to occur, the unions had to give their members
freedom to profess the political doctrine they considered, and to
participate in the respective political organizations, as long as they
did not bring political debates to the economic organization, that is,
to the union.
Under the influence of revolutionary unionism, and with the full
participation of anarchists, the local workers' federations of the
country grew in militancy. This organic growth allowed the Galician
workers' movement to extend its scope of action beyond the labor field.
With the foundations laid in the professional unions, the local workers'
federations promoted the generation of new organizations to defend the
interests of the working class, such as tenant societies, agrarian
unions or economic defense committees, with which to confront the
problem of access to basic products. These were organizations that, like
the professional unions, had the vocation of grouping the entire
proletariat -beyond their ideological orientation- in a unitary struggle
against the capitalists on each front of struggle. This process of
accumulation of social force and extension of the areas of influence of
the Galician libertarian workers' movement led the Catholic chronicler
Pedro Sangro y Ros de Olano to assert, as early as 1908, that A Coruña -
a stronghold of Galician anarchism - had become a sort of "libertarian
colony in an organized regime". A libertarian colony whose area of
influence already covered by 1914 an area of more than 20km around
the city, in which the Local Workers' Federation had the capacity to
impose, through facts, and without any legislative mediation, the 8-hour
workday. He nicknamed this territorial extension in which acratic
workerism was the dominant force as the Syndicalist Canton . A canton
that had been forged in barely a decade of work by the anarchists under
the strategic parameters of revolutionary syndicalism.
The proliferation of unitary organizations of the working class struggle
generated in Galicia a social space suitable for the diffusion of
libertarian ideas among the proletariat. In the neighborhoods and towns
of the country, the anarchists founded, through their specific groups, a
number of atheneums and social studies centers, rationalist schools and
popular universities. Those institutions, together with newspapers,
pamphlets and other editorial production, helped to link the experiences
of proletarian struggle with anarchist ideas, creating a framework for
collective debate and training, and imprinting a revolutionary
orientation on the Galician labor movement. This extension of
libertarian ideas and the consequent radicalization of the Galician
proletariat could only happen because anarchism was embedded in society,
it was people, it was in the struggles of the people.
The outbreak of the Russian Revolution and the consequent influence of
the Bolshevik model on the international labor movement, among other
factors, caused the rupture of the unitary tendency that revolutionary
syndicalism had managed to instill in the Iberian labor movement, and
which had had its reference center in the National Confederation of
Labor (CNT). Despite this split in syndicalism and the closure of the
CNT's identity around anarchist ideas and principles, the Galician
Regional Confederation of the CNT had a base of more than thirty
thousand members during the Second Republic. Its union strength extended
throughout the country, coming to dominate entire branches of
production, such as fishing, whose network of unions covered almost the
entire Galician coast, grouped around the Regional Federation of the
Fishing Industry. The anarcho-syndicalists also led some of the largest
strikes in the country's history during that period. This is the case of
the strike of the paired vessels that began in July 1932 in Bouzas,
which led the Vigo fishing employers to declare a lockout. An action
that was responded to by the CNT with a general strike in the entire
Vigo fishing fleet that would paralyze work activity in that port until
December of that same year. The conflict, aggravated by the
cross-attacks between employers and unionists, was able to be sustained
by the Vigo workers for half a year thanks to the solidarity organized
by the CRG as a whole, whose unions not only made financial
contributions to the resistance fund, but also developed a network to
welcome the daughters and sons of the striking workers throughout the
country. Shortly afterwards, a strike in defense of the six-hour workday
would paralyze all economic activity linked to the construction sector
in A Coruña for several months. Since August 1933, a wave of class
solidarity has swept through all the workers' societies in the city and
the country, which, together with the creation of resistance funds,
managed to organize themselves in their workplaces to produce extra in
order to distribute the surpluses free of charge among the striking
workers, and thus meet their basic needs, and those of their families.
An experience of self-management struggle that could only be overcome
through the repression unleashed in December of that year after the
declaration of the revolutionary general strike throughout the territory
of the Spanish State. This was the context of the revolutionary frenzy
of 1933 that would extend beyond the union sphere, with some anarchist
groups starring in insurrectionary episodes, such as the attempt to
declare libertarian communism in the municipality of Oleiros, after the
assault of a hundred anarchists on the town hall and the Guardia Civil
Barracks in the town. The proclamation, two years later, of the
Libertarian Agricultural Commune of Bendilló, in the municipality of
Quiroga (Lugo), was another example of the pre-revolutionary situation
in which Galicia found itself in 1936,and the advances that the
libertarian socialist project had achieved within the Galician people. A
process of accumulation of self-managed popular power, with a
revolutionary orientation, which had been undertaken by Galician
anarchists at the end of the 19th century, and which could only be
interrupted by the military coup d'état of June 1936. The genocide
derived from that coup, and the national-Catholic dictatorship, would
manage to forcefully remove the anarchists from the Galician people. A
removal that lasts to this day, but which can begin to be reversed
through the strategic approaches of Social and Organized Anarchism.
Dani Palleiro
Xesta, Galician Anarchist Organization
https://regeneracionlibertaria.org/2025/11/21/estratexia-e-organizacion-na-historia-do-anarquismo-galego-1871-1936/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
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